TRENDING

Pulse

By GCN Staff

Cori, the next-gen supercomputer for exascale science

The Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center and Cray Inc. signed a contract for a next-generation supercomputer to support scientific discovery at the DOE’s Office of Science.

Using Intel’s next-generation Intel Xeon Phi processor, the new Cray XC system will deliver 10 times the sustained computing capability of NERSC’s Hopper system, a Cray XE6 supercomputer,

The new processor, — code-named “Knights Landing” — is a self-hosted, many-core processor with on-package high-bandwidth memory that delivers more than 3 teraFLOPS of double-precision peak performance per single socket node, says Cray. Delivery is scheduled for mid-2016.

To highlight its commitment to advancing research, NERSC names its supercomputers after noted scientists. The new system will be named “Cori” in honor of bio-chemist and Nobel Laureate Gerty Cori, the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in science.

NERSC Director Sudip Dosanjh said the new supercomputer “will provide a significant increase in capability for our users and will provide a platform for transitioning our very broad user community to energy-efficient, many-core architectures. It will also let users analyze large quantities of data being transferred to NERSC from DOE’s experimental facilities.”

Cori will have over 9300 Knights Landing compute nodes and provide over 400 gigabytes per second of I/O bandwidth and 28 petabytes of disk space. The contract also includes an option for a “Burst Buffer,” a layer of NVRAM that would move data more quickly between processor and disk, allowing users to make the most efficient use of the system while saving energy. The Cray XC system features the Aries high-performance interconnect linking the processors, which also increases efficiency.

Cori will be installed directly into the new Computational Research and Theory facility currently being constructed on the main Berkeley Lab campus.